Mac OS X: Read Linux ext3 / ext4 External USB Hard Disk Partition

How do I read (mount and access files) ext3 / ext4 external hard disk partition under Mac OS X? Apple Mac OS X cannot directly mount and use ext3 and/or ext4 file systems. In other words, you need to use 3rd party driver or application to access ext3 / ext4 file systems. Another option is to use Oracle VM VirtualBox application which is an x86 virtualization software package for OS X. You can use any guest os like Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora Linux to access ext3 / ext4 file systems.

Login to Linux guest using ssh or console. You can see your external hard disk details using any one of the following commands under Linux:tail -f /var/log/messages ORfdisk -l You can mount it as follows:mkdir /media/usb mount /dev/sdd1 /media/usb Replace /dev/sdd1 with actual device name.

How Do I Copy Files To Apple OS X?

You can install samba on Linux and share file with Apple OS X. Another option is to use rsync or scp / sftp client from Apple OS X:rsync -av user@debian.guest:/media/usb/datadir1/ ~/Desktops/datadir1/ scp user@debian.guest:/media/usb/data/sales.dat /path/to/dest

One thing I find somewhat disconcerting is that a year later, using ANOTHER operating system is still the only real solution. I can understand windoze not having an easy path to ext3/4, but osx? It just doesn’t seem reasonable. I guess I shouldn’t complain — all I really use my mbp for is the host for my virtualbox guests, which actually do all of the heavy lifting. I love my mbp — I just wish apple loved it as much as the users do.